A variety of approaches to developing driverless vehicles and automating conventional vehicles (e.g., manually-driven automotive vehicles) are principally directed to autonomous driving based on sensor data, such as image data or radar. In some approaches, a conventional autonomous vehicle typically requires a human driver to assume control (e.g., braking, steering, etc.) during situations for which computational processing may be ill-suited to ensure the safety of the vehicle or occupants.
Although functional, conventional autonomous vehicles and their safety mechanisms and protocols suffer a number of drawbacks. For example, when an autonomous vehicle fails to sense external environments or compute trajectories over which to drive, the autonomous vehicle usually alerts a human driver to engage the controls of the vehicle to drive out from fault or hazardous conditions. Other drawbacks are also present in a variety of known approaches to implementing safety devices in traditional autonomous vehicles.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for implementing autonomous safety control functions in autonomous vehicles, without the limitations of conventional techniques.